Are Bad Reviews Really Tanking Your Site?

Sources say that up to 92 percent of all online shoppers investigate and consult with online review sites before making a buying decision.

Whether online shoppers want to book a stay at a hotel, find affordable airline tickets, buy bedding for their home, or whether they’d simply like to try out a new restaurant, most of them aren’t going to make blind purchases, and they don’t have to.

In fact, online reviews, once a helpful tool to help promote transparency and branding for companies, has now become an industry in of itself.

Think of mega-review sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and ZocDoc (just to name a few), and you can picture just how important the rating system has become. In fact, those stars have become so ubiquitous, you can find them after performing a search engine query-many of the query results for products and service providers are now listed with revue rating averages, represented by stars.

There’s no doubt about it-those stars represent either a high-quality product and a brand that consumers should trust, or they represent poor customer service, poorly-produced products, and negative branding.

It’s easy to see why companies and small business operations have come to fear the ratings, to the point of doing everything (and sometimes, illegal things) in order to avoid generating anything less than three stars, although, four and five stars are best.

Perhaps you’ve kept your eye out on various review sites in the attempt to find out what others are saying about your company. More to the point, you want to find out how many stars those reviews average. After all, those stars can mean the difference between being financially in the black, or in the red!

But let’s say that after digging around, you’ve learned that some of the reviewers left bad remarks, and they’ve rated your company low. Let’s say that they left seemingly disparaging remarks about their shopping experience with your company, and they rewarded your company with one or two stars.

Not only will this bring your average score down, but those remarks will be available for prospective shoppers from around the world to read. Strangers around the world will be able to form opinions about your company, and you won’t be able to do anything about it, right?

Not so fast!

First, know that all is not lost when and if your company has generated low scores and poor reviews. There’s a variety of reasons why this might have taken place, and you might be surprised to learn that many of these reasons have nothing to do with you or your employees.

Here’s a handful of reasons as to why your company is generating bad press on the review sites, or even, on your company site if your site allows for product reviews:

Sneaky competitors gaining market share

One of the realities of operating in a free market is the fact that you’ll do battle with competitors. Another reality is that competitors don’t always play fair, and that definitely applies to the battle of online reviews.

It’s not uncommon for industry competitors to spy on your company’s reviews and overall progress. If your competitors want to bring your market share down a few notches, then they can send their minions to various sites (including yours) to leave bad reviews.

Disgruntled, hard-to-please customers

Some customers are genuinely hard to please, usually for reasons beyond what your customer service team is able to resolve. These are the customers who are all too happy to smear campaign your company’s brand on review sites.

Vengeful, angry former employees

Has your company recently let go of a large quantity of employees, particularly under less-than-ideal circumstances? Have any of your C-levels (or middle managers) been fired, lately? Might anyone formerly in your organization have an axe to grind?

Internet trolls

Finally, your brand name might be attacked by internet trolls. These are digital bullies who visit various websites, starting arguments, and leaving inflammatory statements in the hopes of starting trouble-plain and simple.

You might not be off the hook

As you can see, there are plenty of reasons why your brand might generate poor ratings that have nothing to do with your team…but what if your team is to blame?

Customers have every right to ding your ratings for issues including:

Genuine disdain/dislike for your product/service

Poor customer service

Breakdown in the shipping process

So what should you do when this occurs? The appropriate teams need to give deep thought to the areas of the sales, fulfillment, and shipping process that they can fix. And don’t worry about ratings that are beyond your company’s control.

Yes, they’ll bring down the overall star average, but today’s shoppers are very savvy. They know how to sift through nonsense, and they’re often fair. They understand how to cast aside baseless, over-the-top bad reviews, and they’ll often give your company the opportunity to redeem itself.

After all, they’re checking your company out because they’re looking for reasons to spend money on your brand!

Terri is a content marketing storyteller and strategist. She teaches marketing and entrepreneurship through stories for marketers of all stripes. Her specialty is creating narrative and she writes essays and memoir in her spare time.